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Banning (or, more precisely, disturbing operation of) a decentralized service is much easier than a big, important centralized one. You just need to obtain the
by ajconway 6y ago
Banning (or, more precisely, disturbing operation of) a decentralized service is much easier than a big, important centralized one. You just need to obtain the DNS names or IP addresses of the nodes the same way everyone else does — by participating in the network. This way you can even selectively ban the "bad" nodes.
Banning a centralized service like gmail is easier, but then you lose in productivity as 90% of your country's businesses are likely to rely on it.
As far as privacy goes, it's also easier to coerce admins of smaller nodes to disclose valuable information than fighting with a multinational foreign corporation.
This is not an argument against decentralization. It's just not immediately obvious that decentralization does not automatically lead to censorship resistance. To do that we need onion routing or mix networks as a base for all our communications, so that banning the network would be equivalent to disconnecting the ISP from the Internet altogether.
- baybal2 6y ago> You just need to obtain the DNS names or IP addresses of the nodes the same way everyone else does — by participating in the network. Not if such network was made purposefully to minimize transparency.
- ajconway 6y agoI don't see how this can be done without anonymization techniques like the onion routing. If you can think of one, please share.
- CivBase 6y agoWouldn't you also have to keep searching for and squashing content mirrors all the time? That seems like a pretty big investment to me.
- ajconway 6y agoCorrect, but so will the users until one of the sides gives up.
- nickysielicki 6y agoYour argument seems to depend on the idea that centralized services are inherently more popular than decentralized services, which isn’t necessarily true. To say that it’s “much easier” to ban hundreds of IP addresses instead of a dozen IP addresses is ridiculous. It’s no easier to get IP addresses in a distributed system than it is to get them in a centralized system. GMail is a funny example to point to, because email is arguably the most used digital communication method and it’s also decentralized. Try to fully shut down email in the US — where are you going to find a list of all ip addresses hosting SMTP and IMAP servers, and is that going to be easier than just blocking Twitter?
- selfhoster11 6y ago> Where are you going to find a list of all ip addresses hosting SMTP and IMAP servers? Shodan is a readily available database of such data. Just search for all hosts with IMAP, SMTP and POP3 ports exposed and then block those. Alternatively, a DIY scan of the whole IPv4 address range can be accomplished within hours or days. IPv6 address space is harder to scan, but it's arguably safe to ban all such traffic since nearly nothing critical uses IPv6.
- Ekaros 6y agoOr even simpler. Just scan all domains for MX records... That information is not even secret, but openly advertised.
- folmar 6y agoMX is not crucial for email, everything falls back to A. I have an email server with no MX in production for years now. Not the most important one, but in use. Edited to add: there is a tiny fraction of providers that would reject the emails from such a setup, but it's really not common and does not include large providers.
- oblio 6y agoIn practice centralized services are just more popular. Less hassle to handle them, for users. And email is practically the only decentralized system in widespread use these days. And it's not centralized, but close to it. You shut down 3 or 4 email services, 95% of its traffic is gone.
- vimy 6y agohttps://getaether.net/docs/tech/ https://getaether.net/docs/tech/ Aether is peer to peer. I don't see it being censored easily.